ChappieReview

Director Neill Blomkamp is concerned about our future. If his first two features—District 9 and Elysium—didn't make that clear, his newest movie, Chappie, most certainly does. It is the tale of a sentient robot finding the best and worst of humanity, and while it may not be perfect, it asks the right questions.

Set in the near future, Chappie takes place in a Johannesburg where robotic police droids known as Scouts are in heavy use. This police force has been created by Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) and produced by the corporation Tetra Vaal. Wilson, not content with his success, believes he can do one better than Scouts. He thinks he can make robots that think and feel for themselves. Tetra Vaal CEO Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver) shuts down this dream, but Wilson opts to go off the reservation and pursue it anyway.

It does not go well.

The issue is not that Deon has a huge enemy at Tetra Vaal in the form of Vincent Moore (a mullet sporting Hugh Jackman), who blames Wilson for Moore's own robot project getting cutback. No, it is that Wilson is frantically pursuing technological advancement without stopping to think of the consequences of doing such work without the appropriate safeguards.

The movie is very much situated in our world, just a few years into the future. How then could the developer of such a robot not grapple with Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics or with any number of films where robots created for good end up going off and doing evil? Moore raises questions about sentient robots to some extent, but he is too quickly turned into a villain and his line of reasoning is dismissed.

Moving that to the side, while they may help set the plot in motion, neither Wilson nor Moore is the main character. That honor belongs to the robot himself.

Whatever else may be wrong with the film, the robot, Chappie, is most definitely right. Chappie is brought to life in extraordinary fashion by Sharlto Copley and a team of animators. In front of the camera during filming and then animated over in post-production, Copley imbues the character with such humanity that the audience really feels for him and his plight. Truly, the results are incredible.

Exit Theatre Mode

When he first has Wilson’s new software installed, Chappie starts out as little more than a rapidly progressing infant, and we get to see him grow up over the course of the film. Some of the best scenes are those where Copley is tasked with portraying this child-like robot coming across something heretofore unimaginable in his world, like the wonder of watching a He-Man cartoon and trying to make sense of what he's seeing.

Also turning in enjoyable performances are Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser, a duo perhaps better known as the South African rap-rave group, Die Antwoord. They play potential future versions of themselves, post-music career, who have traded their old life for one of less-than-legal activities. They act as surrogate parents to Chappie, teaching the newly conscious robot a rather skewed view of the world in an attempt to help themselves out of a predicament. Like real parents, the two don't always see eye-to-eye on the best way to bring up their adopted offspring, and watching Chappie navigate that conflict is another great aspect of the movie.

As one would expect, the story pushes towards a massive shoot-out between Moore's robotic creation, Chappie, and more than one faction of humans. It would have been fascinating to see Blomkamp craft an ending that doesn't necessitate such an action scene, that instead deals with the serious questions the film raises. On the plus side, despite the sequence being a foregone conclusion, the battle is a fun one which doesn't overstay its welcome.

Exit Theatre Mode

The opening of the film tells us that Chappie's existence radically alters the world, but what we aren't told is how. That is left up to our imagination… for now. Blomkamp has treatments for two other films that would turn this into a trilogy, but at this moment the outgrowth of the creation is just another big question left unanswered.

Whether you choose to view Blomkamp's vision of our future as inevitable or as a cautionary tale, Chappie, as with Blomkamp's other films before it, does an excellent job of making the pitfalls explicit. Self-aware robots may sound cool, and we may inexorably be headed in that direction, but not going about it the right way could spell our doom.

The Verdict

Chappie offers up an enjoyable story of a potentially beneficial science escaping the hands of those who would use it for good. It asks big, important, questions about right and wrong and how we should pursue technology and treat other members of humanity. It doesn't always answer those questions, however, preferring to let them hang in the air - or perhaps devolve into a big action sequence.